Donors no longer want to contribute to their campaigns. Primary opponents are lining up to take them out. And some of them have been ex-communicated from caucuses on Capitol Hill.
The eight House Republicans who took the unprecedented step of removing Kevin McCarthy from the speakership are facing blowback, both in Washington and back home. It’s a sign that even four months after the historic move, emotions are still raw inside a GOP conference that is continuing to reel from McCarthy’s ouster.
Reps. Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Bob Good of Virginia have arguably received the most incoming fire, with both now facing serious primary threats as they gear up for reelection. And Rep. Matt Rosendale, who recently jumped into the US Senate race in Montana, is facing headwinds in GOP circles — in part because of his vote to boot McCarthy — as top Republicans fear he will cost them a pivotal seat.
A well-connected GOP outside spending group is planning to play in the races against Good and Mace, while McCarthy himself is widely expected to get involved as well, according to multiple Republican sources familiar with the matter.
Meanwhile, the Main Street Caucus and Republican Governance Group, two center-right-leaning groups on Capitol Hill, have both quietly dropped Mace from their ranks, multiple sources told CNN. Neither move was publicized, but sources say frustration with the congresswoman had been brewing for months leading up to her McCarthy vote.
“She really wants to be a caucus of one. So we obliged her,” one House Republican told CNN...
Yes, it's "Republicans in disarray." It's real and it's spectacular (and we're loving it)! Also, "Good, Bob Good."
... It’s something else entirely for a party to reject its own ideas to address a crisis simply because it doesn’t want to get in the way of a campaign issue. This is exactly what Republicans did at the behest of former president Donald Trump after President Biden and Senate Democrats offered the best deal the GOP could hope for to strengthen the nation’s southern border.
You have to feel for Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who was chosen by Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to negotiate the border deal precisely because he had tough immigration views. Trump himself described Lankford in his 2022 endorsement as “Strong on the Border.”
But if Trump claims the right as president to break the law, he also asserts the right to lie with impunity. He insisted, falsely: “I did not endorse Sen. Lankford. I didn’t do it.” Former students at Trump University are familiar with this sort of thing.
Lankford recounted on the Senate floor what happens these days to Republicans who try to legislate: A “popular commentator,” he said, threatened to “destroy” him if he dared try to solve the border crisis during a presidential election year.
The episode speaks to how the trends [Thomas] Mann and [Norman] Ornstein caught on to early have metastasized. Power in the GOP has moved away from elected officials and toward those right-wing “commentators” on television, radio, podcasts and online. The creation of ideological media bubbles enhances their power. Republicans in large numbers rely on partisan outlets that lied freely about what Lankford’s compromise did and didn’t do, rather than on straight news reports.
The party’s hostile vibe can also be traced back to a habit in the Bush years to distinguish between “real America” (the places that vote Republican) and what is presumably unreal America. Declaring a large swath of the population to be less than American means they’re not worth dealing with and, increasingly, easy to hold in contempt.
Then there is the denigration of science, dispassionate research and technical knowledge. In his book “The Death of Expertise,” writer Tom Nichols described this mournfully as a “campaign against established knowledge.”...
The op/ed's title is "Let's Just Say It: The Republican Problem Is Metastasizing." Like a democracy- destroying cancer, that is.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce may be America's sweethearts, said David Corn in Mother Jones, but they're also threats to the national security of "MAGA-land." For those blissfully unaware of the far-right's current "fever dream," Fox News hosts and Trumpist influencers have been promoting for weeks the truly "bonkers" conspiracy theory that the very public romance between the pop superstar and Kansas City Chiefs tight end is "a Pentagon psyop." A sprawling cabal of "deep-state globalists" — encompassing the White House, George Soros, and the National Football League — supposedly engineered the Chiefs' Super Bowl run to lend "more oomph" to the power couple's "presumed 2024 endorsement of President Biden." This "is not the first lunatic idea to have gotten traction on the Right," said Rich Lowry in Politico. But it might be the most "stupid and perverse." What could better embody the "traditional" American values conservatives say they support than a burly football star hooking up with a girly former country singer? And then there's the electoral insanity of attacking Swift, the most popular musician on the planet, who needs the NFL to "promote her much as John Lennon needed Yoko Ono to make him popular."
"Dumb and strange is par for the course with MAGA," said David French in The New York Times. Since Donald Trump launched his political career on the "birther" theory that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, his MAGA movement has lurched from one "deeply weird" conspiracy theory to the next. That Kelce is a pitchman for Pfizer's Covid vaccine and Swift endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 gives the couple an "infernal combination of affiliations," making them a natural target of MAGA paranoia. Conservatives do resent Swift's politics and her potential to drive legions of Swifties to the polls, said Amanda Marcotte in Salon. But "mostly the Right is mad" at this happily unmarried 34-year-old billionaire for shattering the myth that women end up "ugly and unloved" if they put career before family.
What really has "MAGA heads exploding," said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post, is the intrusion of Swift's juggernaut into football. The angry young men who are Trump's loudest supporters consider football "their sport — macho, regimented, nationalistic, violent," a last redoubt of Real America in a culture otherwise lost to the gender-fluid horrors of liberalism. To these "MAGA bros," even "a 10-second cutaway shot" of Swift cheering Kelce on from a stadium box feels like an unbearable invasion of their safe space. Not to mention a betrayal, said Jeet Heer in The Nation. The tall, blond, country-singing Swift was once an idolized "Aryan goddess" to the racist far right. Then she pivoted to pop, endorsed Biden, and "Hell hath no fury like a Nazi spurned."...
Cry more, MAGATs! Chiefs 25, 49ers 22 (OT).
Here's the thing: We would have been o.k. with either team winning. But MAGAts will be unhappy with any outcome, because it's a choice between Swift's Chiefs vs. the 49ers, home to Nancy Pelosi and those oft-vilified "San Francisco Democrats." They might also be unhappy to know the Super Bowl is expected to generate $17.3 billion for the Biden economy. Thanks, NFL!
